December 2019 table of contents

It’s December. Here in the northern hemisphere, that means cold weather and more hours of darkness. To celebrate the season, we’ve loaded this issue chock full searches for things that go bump in the night.

Jei D. Marcade’s “That Night at Henry’s Place” takes on horror movie tropes as you search for a missing friend at a party that’s getting out of hand. In Astrid Dalmady’s “Night Guard / Morning Star,” you must hunt down a vanished painting–and the truth about your relationship with your mother. Last–but certainly not least!–Elizabeth Smyth’s “Zoinks!” asks one of life’s fundamental questions: Can you get away with it, in spite of those meddling kids? (And their mangy mutt, too.)

We’ll round out the issue with essays from Anya Johanna DeNiro and Sharang Biswas, and “I Found You First,” our festive, seasonally appropriate cover art by Laura De Stefani.

This is our last issue for 2019–phew! 2020 is going to be a little different. For one thing, we’re going to be switching to a non-profit organization. To support that goal, and to make sure that sub-Q is sustainable for the long term, we’ll be running a subscription drive some time in the summer.

One important impact of that on 2020 is that for now, we don’t have an open subscription period planned. That’s because the three issues planned for the year (February, April, and June/July) either already have content or will be special cases. February will include the winners of our 2019 subQjam (which you can join now on itch.io!) alongside a game by Ken Liu and one other guest author. The June/July issue will be our subscription drive issue.

A little bit more about that: Rather than a Kickstarter-style fundraiser where success is measured in dollar amounts, we’re hoping to gain enough subscribers to keep the magazine going without having to run a fundraiser every year.

The success of the drive will affect how the rest of 2020 looks in terms of what and how much we publish and how much we can afford to pay for it. We’ll have more news in early 2020, but the short version is that we can’t keep running the magazine without help from our readers.

All told, we’ll need just over 260 annual subscribers (or a similar number of monthly ones) to stay in the game at our current level. Currently our numbers are about a factor of ten lower than that, so if you want to help us meet our goals you can get a head start by signing up for our Patreon or subscribing on the website today. Doing so will also mean you get to see our special issue as soon as it’s available–instead of only if we reach our funding goal.

(Note, though, that we still haven’t become a transition at this point, so donations and subscriptions are not tax deductible quite yet!).

Of course, if we hit our goal before June/July, well… that means we’ll just stay open for business as usual, probably with an open submission period early in the year.